Citizens plant, the city cuts: Mumbai’s growing battle over green space

Ganesh said the initiative reflected growing frustration among residents over the lack of ecological planning.

“The basic reason for a citizen (to get involved in these initiatives) is to improve their surroundings. The government doesn’t look at small patches done by citizen-led movements,” she said. “The main responsibility falls onto the government.”

The group says the project has already shown measurable benefits.

“After planting our garden, we tested and noticed a 10% improvement in the AQI from the garden entrance to our micro-forest,” Ganesh said.

A dense micro-forest developed by volunteers with My Micro Forests in R. R. Patil Garden, Mulund. (Source: Express Photo)

But the challenges remain considerable.

“When we first planted, it got washed out because of very heavy rains,” Ganesh said, adding that a micro-forest typically requires nearly two years of monitoring and watering before it can sustain itself.

Subhajit Mukherjee, founder of Mission Green Mumbai, said his organisation learnt similar lessons through years of plantation work.

“When we planted our first plantation in Mumbai, all the trees died within six months,” he said. “We realized that only planting trees will not do anything.”

More than a decade later, Mukherjee says increasing concretisation has made tree survival far more difficult.

“Earlier wherever you planted, trees would comfortably survive. Now, due to concretisation, trees are not surviving,” he said.

Mission Green Mumbai eventually shifted its focus towards water conservation systems that help trees survive beyond the monsoon.

“In the process we learned that simply planting trees is not enough, we need to provide water,” Mukherjee said. “If you look at it, where water is, trees are.”

Yet even successful citizen-led initiatives often struggle against the scale of urban redevelopment.

“It has happened where we planted trees and then a few years later development starts on that same plot of land and they cut all the trees,” he said.

“We have to raise our voices as citizens if the government is cutting trees.”

Volunteers with My Micro Forests at their micro-forest in R. R. Patil Garden, Mulund. (Source: Express Photo)

Architect Rahul Kadri, head architect of the Malabar Hill Walkway project and a member of the Mumbai Architects Collective, said the city continues to prioritise roads and vehicles over ecology.

“Our roads are optimized for cars only,” Kadri said. “There’s countless spots in the city where the road widens and narrows. A lot of times there is extra space on the side of roads which could be made into landscape spaces which will add tremendous greenery to the city.”

Kadri pointed to stretches such as Girgaon Chowpatty, where broad concrete-heavy roads and underutilised edges could be redesigned to accommodate more greenery.

He said architects had repeatedly urged authorities to integrate ecological considerations into urban planning.

“We wrote to the authorities warning them about the harebrained proposal to convert Mahalaxmi Racecourse into a public park but they have different priorities I suppose,” Kadri said.

Environmental experts, however, caution against viewing plantation drives and micro-forests as substitutes for preserving existing ecosystems.

“The city has seen sustained loss of nature driven by infrastructure expansion and redevelopment, which has made the impacts of this loss — urban heat, flooding and declining air quality — more tangible in everyday life,” said Deepti Talpade, Program Lead, Urban Development and Resilience at WRI India.

“Micro-forests and plantation drives cannot compensate for the loss of mature trees in ecological or climatic terms,” Talpade said. “Mature trees represent decades of biomass accumulation, root system development, soil conditioning and ecological relationships with surrounding flora and fauna.”

She warned that plantation drives risk becoming symbolic exercises used to justify ecological losses elsewhere.

“There is a real risk of plantation drives being framed as compensatory measures that justify the removal of mature trees,” Talpade said.

“Citizen-led efforts are important but not sufficient on their own. Infrastructure planning needs to move beyond compensatory planting toward strategies that avoid tree loss wherever possible.”